Survey: Americans deleting music files

November 20, 2003|By THE WASHINGTON POST.

Research firm NPD Group Inc. released a report last week estimating that in August, 1.4 million households in the United States deleted all the digital music files saved on their computer hard drives, which the research firm credited to increased warnings and a flurry of lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America against unauthorized sharers of music files.

The survey information was collected from a sampling of 40,000 volunteer online panelists, who let the firm track their computer usage with special software. NPD says the group is balanced to represent the larger population of Web users in the United States.

This tracking software could not, however, tell if the files deleted had been downloaded from any file-sharing systems.

The research firm's study also concluded that the number of households acquiring digital music via peer-to-peer file-sharing services declined by 11 percent from August to September--around the same time the RIAA issued its ultimatum to file traders and began suing some for copyright infringement.

The study has its skeptics, however.

"How the [bleep] do they know that?" said Wayne Rosso, president of Internet peer-to-peer file-sharing service Grokster. "These guys just don't have the right methodology to make these claims."